The Child Minder

Shortly after his move into number 10 Gordon Brown announced, unexpectedly, the creation of the Department for Children, Schools and Families.This will take up the children's functions of the now defunct Department for Education and Skills and also, crucially, have joint responsibility for young offenders with the Ministry of Justice.

Social workers dealing with unaccompanied asylum seeking children are facing an increasingly hard job as a result of age disputes – but imagine how it feels for the child.

Two weeks ago the government announced plans to place a duty on the immigration service to safeguard asylum seeking children. At first glance you could be forgiven for whole heartedly endorsing this policy and assuming asylum seeking children wre being given, finally, the same level of protection as other youngsters. But on closer inspection this is not the case.

Today is a good day for asylum-seeking children. While they may have been barely mentioned in the Care Matters white paper on looked-after children last week, there was better news today from an unlikely source as the Home Office finally admitted defeat over its much-maligned policy on removing support from failed asylum-seeking families in order to persuade them to go home.

When you utter the phrase Section 9 there are few in the social care sector who don't know what you are talking about. The government's twisted policy, under which failed asylum seekers who refuse to return home can have their children taken into care, has become infamous for taking asylum laws to an even lower depth.

A report published last week by the Immigration Law Practioners' Association, When Is a Child Not a Child? has alleged that some social work managers are pressurising or instructing social workers to assess unaccompanied asylum seeking children as older than they are in order to save money.

The highly comprehensive report highlights the potential conflict of interest in the currrent system where social workers who carry out the assessment work for the local authority who will then have to support the child.

Of course it is unfair for social work managers to exert pressure on social workers in this way but they are not the real villians of the piece. It is only due to the government's constant failure to properly fund services for this group that they feel compelled to try to safeguard their employers' resources.

As anyone working with unaccompanied minors knows the rates given out to councils to pay for unaccompanied minors are too low with the leaving care costs associated with the group being particularly burdensome.

The government's suggestion that it is OK to place 16-year-old unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in 'independent living arrangements' - including B&B accommodation - when they have already acknowledged that most children of this age would find leaving home 'alien' stinks of discrimination.

Why would a child who has experienced terrible loss and trauma and finds themself in a strange country need less support than any other child? Surely they need more.

Care Matters rightly proposes that most children in care should remain with their carers until at least age 18. It even plans to pilot allowing young people to continue to live with their foster familes up to the age of 21.

Things are always going to become problematic once unaccompanied asylum-seeking children turn 18 given the Home Office's determination to increase the number it sends home (and the speed with which it does so). But we must at least ensure that, before these young people turn 18, they are treated the same as all other children in care living in the UK.

The proposed improvements to the care system are welcome, but they must be open to all. A two-tier care system based on a child's nationality (or anything else for that matter) is not acceptable.

Hillingdon Council - criticised last week by the children's commissioner for allegedly offering a lesser service to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children than other children in care - took on the government at the High Court yesterday over the costs of caring for this group of children.

The council said a £6m cut in the grant it received for assisting young asylum seekers nearing adulthood had resulted in dramatic cutbacks in key services and contributed to anti-immigration sentiments locally.

The council is demanding an extra £40 per week per child to be able to provide these young people with the support they need.

The judge has promised to deliver his verdict on the case soon. But it seems obvious to me that the concerns flagged up by the children's commissioner and the massive funding cut imposed on the council are in some way connected.

The right outcome must be an obligation on the government to fund councils so they are in a position to provide an equitable service to all children in their care (without having to waste a penny more on legal challenges).

I was horrified to learn from the children's commissioner this week that Hillingdon are operating a two-tier system for children in care, based on their country of birth.

The discriminatory system works like this: for children in care born in the UK, there is a presumption at the west London council that they will remain looked-after until they are 18; for those in the system who arrived in the UK as unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors, there is a policy of ejecting them from the care system as soon as they turn 16 and have notched up the minimum 13 weeks in care required to qualify for (significantly cheaper) leaving care services instead.

Hillingdon blames their actions on the government's failure to properly reimburse them for the 900 unaccompanied minors who have ended up in their care (via Heathrow airport). In deed, it is due to challenge the government's alleged underfunding of services for unaccompanied minors in the High Court next week.

But the fact remains that the council is operating a system which, according to the office of the children's commissioner, is unlawful.

With every new year comes new hope, and 2007 is no different!

I - presumably along with many of you - hope for greater equality, greater strides towards the elimination of child poverty, and improved life chances for disadvantaged children. But then we probably wish for that every year, with varying degrees of success.

More specific hopes for this year lie, for me, with asylum-seeking children and children with disabilties.

In December, the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign announced that it already had 10,000 supporters signed up to get rights and justice for disabled children. They have a new target of 25,000 signatures by July 2007, and I am hopeful that not only will they exceed this, but that the politicians and decision-makers will sit up and take notice of all these people and help deliver on the campaign's worthy objectives.

In terms of unaccompaned asylum-seeking children, my optimisim is more tempered. The Home Office is on the verge of announcing its plans for reforming the system that supports this group of vulnerable children - and I am desperately trying to remain positive about the whole thing.

If anyone wasn't worried about John Reid being mentioned as a possible contenter for the job of Prime Minister before, they should be now.

Two stories coming out of his department this week clearly demonstrate his hardline approach to social policy. First, we have the decision to deport a seven-year-old child trafficked into the country from Kenya despite the potenital opportunity to reunite her in the UK with her mother. Secondly, there is the news that the long-awaited consultation on proposed reforms to services for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will leave them worse off than other children in care.